Tim Cadotte (photo: MPS)
Chris Stewart certainly doesn’t mince his words when talking about race. Tim Cadotte, until yesterday the principal of Burroughs Elementary, found that out when Stewart paid a routine, although unannounced visit to the school a few days ago as part of his duties as a member of the Minneapolis Board of Education. At least one Board member is supposed to visit every school in the district each year, to check on the school in-person. I’ll bet that Cadotte flew off the handle at Stewart when the latter accused him, his school, and his Site Council (a PTA-like body) of racism for trying to get an English-Language Learners program re-instated. Burrough’s old ELL program served mostly Spanish-speaking Latino students.
Wait. What? ELL programs = racism?
Chris Stewart (Photo: MPS)
Sorta. The background to all this is Minneapolis Schools’ restructuring effort: Both of the main proposals for re-organizing the elementary schools and elementary magnet programs make extensive use of schools that draw only from their neighborhood. Because Minneapolis is so segregated, this means schools will either be majority-minority or almost entirely White, even though the district has set a target for a majority of schools to be made up of at least 30% students of color. Both the STrib piece and the KFAI piece linked in the earlier post suggest that the Site Council wanted to reinstate the ELL program as a way to meet this diversity target.
Racism comes in when you look at the probability that a poor Black student will succeed and escape poverty if they are placed in a mostly-Black or a mostly-minority school in Minneapolis — It’s almost a statistical death sentence.* Compared to a poor Black student going to school in a mostly-white school, these black students are far, far more likely to remain in poverty, suffer the same diseases and fates that hit folks in poverty, and die younger than their middle-class counterparts. In past conversations, Stewart has argued that, knowing these statistics, it’s a form of structural racism if you refuse to integrate poor black children into a school, and I’ll bet that’s what happened here. One definition of diversity versus another.
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*I unfortunately do not have these statistics at hand, and I’m working on tracking them down. In his recent book, “Whatever It Takes,” Paul Tough of the NY Times offers the best discussion these numbers that I have seen so far.
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Update 3:10pm, 4/21/09:
Baris Gumus-Dawes, a research fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Race and Poverty, found what I’d been looking for. Sumarized with references to specific studies here, in this pdf, and graphically illustrated in this slide, also a pdf (pun sorta intended). She says, with only 1 in 10 white students in the Twin Cities attending schools with high concentrations of poverty, but nearly 6 out of 10 students of color attending high-poverty schools, the bottom line is that students of color are (statistically speaking) much more likely to wind up in poverty, with a poor education.
“In the Twin Cities, 90% of racially segregated schools are also high-poverty [over 40% of students are eligable for free and reduced-price lunch]. It is well demonstrated in the [scholarly] literature that high-poverty schools have”
- lower test scores
- higher dropout rates
- lower college acceptance and attendance rates
- generally, students have significantly lower income later in life
- and students are at a higher risk of living in poverty as adults
“It’s a well-known fact in the education community that poverty is the biggest determinant of a student’s academic performance [which strongly impacts their income later in life]…Around 60-65% of student performance is determined by the student’s poverty and the school’s poverty.”
Filed under: Minneapolis, Achievement Gap, Chris Stewart, Education, Education Policy, Education Reform, Minneapolis Public Schools, Restructuring, Segregation
Hmmmm, too bad. You seem relatively articulate, but you got this way wrong.
It is awful that there are the poor and destitute. As a loony lefty myself, I’m all for redistribution of the wealth. Since that is unlikely, open enrollment is at least a step in the right direction. I would love to hear the eloquent Mr. Stewart explain to me how getting rid of open enrollment (The board’s current cost-saving goal) will reduce ‘racism’. You yourself state that Mpls is segregated. If Students are required to attend neighborhood schools the numbers will get more lopsided, not less.
More importantly, at a time when Minneapolis schools have such real and pressing needs, Stewart is attempting to defame the most succesful elementary school administrator in Minneapolis. Look at the test scores. Talk to the parents of Burroughs students. My daughter attends Burroughs and is thriving. This school works, and this has made Tim Cadotte a target for some time. Cadotte has the trust and love of his staff and student body and community. He is, by far, the most involved education official I have ever observed.
Chris Stewart not only called the principal a racist, he said the entire school community was racist. That sort of incindiary rhetoric, slathered on in broad strokes, is hardly befitting a man who holds public office. It’s irresponsible and speaks to, perhaps, less obvious motivations. Unfair and malicious speculation, you say? Then let’s call it even. Politics masked as Stewardship is doubly distasteful.
Socio-economic realities can be brutal. Efforts to balance these inequities are laudable. But when the succesful are victimized for being not racist, but successful…welll, Vonnegut’s ‘Harrison Bergeron’ has much to say on the subject.
[...] the system had failed to teach them all the material? And let’s not get started on the Achievement Gap! If the test is too hard, is the infamous Achievement Gap smaller than we think? [...]